Live From Apple’s WWDC 2013 Keynote

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It’s that time again! This morning, Apple CEO Tim Cook will take the stage at the company’s own Worldwide Developers Conference to unveil everything they’ve worked so hard to keep secret for the past many months.

We’ll be seeing iOS 7 for the first time — thats pretty much certain. But what else? Will we see a new version of OS X? New MacBooks? Apple’s fabled Pandora competitor, perhaps?

You’ll have to tune in to find out. We’re live at the keynote, and we’ll be bringing you all of the news as it breaks with our up-to-the-second live blog.

The keynote is scheduled to begin at 10 AM PT (12PM Central, 1 PM Eastern, 6 PM London), but we’ll be bringing you photos and commentary from the scene beginning at about 9 AM — so get here early!

Tim Cook: I’d like to remind everyone that our Goal at Apple is to make really great products, things to improve people’s lives. The words you saw in that video are more than just words; they’re the words we live by. You see them reflected in our products over the years, in the products we showed today, and the products we show in the future.

“The first thing you notice, we’ve got a set of ‘featured stations’ that show the music that is trending on Twitter right now, or, in this case, the music you’ll hear this week at WWDC. But right now, I feel like listening to Summer Songs”

You can scroll back to zoom out from a moment, and expand its range. You can zoom from a view showing all of the photos taken at a location, to all of the photos taken on that day, all the way out to all of the photos taken in a certain year

There’s a crazy new tab interface. Once you’ve tapped the tabs button in the lower right, it zooms out to show all of your tabs in a 3D, scrolling interface. Tabs can be dragged and rearranged, or swiped away (Android/webOS card style)

When you swipe up from the bottom of the device, you now have one-click access to airplane mode, wifi/bluetooth toggles, volume, music playback, and a flashlight (Sorry, all ten million flashlight apps!)

The video pans across Apple’s many products, with Ive talking over it: “We’ve always thought of a design as the way something looks. But it’s the whole thing; the way something works on so many levels. Ultimately, of course, design defines so much of our experience”

He’s now demonstrating Pages in the browser. He adjusts the fonts, tweaks some formatting.. but then drag-and-drops and image from his desktop, right into the in-browser document. The text all reformats itself around the image on-the-fly, as native Pages would. Snazzy!

“The new Mac Pro has DOUBLE the CPU performance of the last. It has the fastest RAM we’ve ever used, double the performance of the last generation. Internal storage is all flash — not just any Flash, but PCIe based Flash. It’s got 1.25 GBps reads, and 1.0 GBps writers”

Phil: I’d like to talk to you about the Macbook Air. In the age of the iPad, what is the future of the notebook? We’ve updated with an entirely new line of Macbook Airs. This new line delivers something we’ve always wanted in this line: all day battery life.

He’s moved on to demonstrating iBook textbooks on the mac. If you’ve used these college textbooks on the mac, much of the functionality is here; you can drop notes into the text (they show up in the sidebar), and interact with all sorts of things (a microscopic view of a leaf and its cells, for example) provided by the publisher.

Calendar can now account for getting from location to location (if you provide the addresses), and will adjust your calendar accordingly based on if you plan to walk, or drive. It can also automatically alert you (on both your Mac and iPhone) when it determines that you’ll need to leave one scheduled event to make it to the next.

Your passwords can now be synced to your iCloud account, with 256-bit AES encryption. When you’re signing up to a page, Safari can suggest a password — once it makes one, it’s automatically synced across all of your iCloud devices.

We’re now looking at Top Sites, the new Safari homepage. When you first click in, it shows your book marks; bring out the slide out drawer on the left, and you can quickly peruse through your “reading list”, much like an RSS reader. As he scrolls to the bottom of one article, it automatically pulls in the next one on your reading list.

“Next, lets talk about your memory. Nothing affects your Mac like its ability to use free memory. In the past, we’d have to write inactive memory to disk — a very slow process. Now, we can just compress inactive memory in place, freeing up all of that space instantly. As a result, we’re able to do things like improve the wake time by up to 1.5x”

“When you look at battery life on your computer, the real battery killer is CPU Load. When you look under the hood at CPU usage, it’s not a smooth line — it’s high use, low use, and back. All of that back and forth actually uses a lot of power. In Mavericks, we smooth out this usage; in doing so, we decrease these spikes by up to 70%”

He’s moving into demonstrating the multiple display functionality; each screen has its own dock, its own menu bar, and apps can be fullscreened independently. Finally! This is how multi-display should have been done.

Cook: Lets talk about the mac. The mac user base is now incredibly strong, at 72 million. We launched a new iMac last year, and it’s already the #1 PC in the world. We launched a new Macbook, and it’s the #1 notebook.

Cook: We have 375,000 apps that have been built *just* for the ipad, and 575 Million accounts linked to the app store. We have more accounts with credit cards than any store on the internet, as far as we know

“We also have some pretty great digital stores. I know that this part is incredibly important for some of you back home. We’ve had the App Store for 5 years, now. Nothing like the App Store existed before. “

“Our stores are filled with our colleagues; our stores are filled with those who are passionate about bettering peoples lives. Tens of thousands of school kids pick the local Apple store for their school fieldtrips”